RockyAussie

Here for what its worth is my trusty old prusa i3. Main mods I can think of are Saddles at the base to help keep steady....Threaded rods at back to keep gantry from the vibration movements.......Heavy wooden base to dampen vibration.....cork under the heated plate to keep better heat distribution. Fan at the side is just to cool off the job quicker when the job is finished to help get the job off the glass faster. The original glass got tooo scratched so I replaced it with a piece of mirror I cut to shape and it been in use for over a year and is still fine. I have another one slowly being made but I am working on a large 2.5watt laser project at the moment which I hope to get going this week sometime. Pic below ...will do a separate post showing how it can be used for making my product boxing with fold lines among other things like cutting leather etc. Merry Christmas

I tend to agree with @Dwight with regards to longevity. All of the bikes I've had that I can remember had a rubber strap to keep the battery snug in place and if I had too I would go with the upholstery leather doubled back to a seam in the middle fully contact glued and probably not stitched along the length. This would at least allow some elasticity to the strap to hold the battery tight.

I am not sure if this is of use but here are some pictures of some flexible plastic that has an excellent memory for springing back into shape. I just buy the binders from an office supply place when I occasionally need them. As you can see they work well for holding the shape and they last for ever. Merry Christmas to you and family. Regards Brian

Nice effort and the colouring looks good as well. Merry Christmas to you all.

I did not like the look of the movement of the needle once located in the shaft so I would check that the needle is pretty close to 2mm dia at the top first. I just checked a needle in my old 69 and that takes 2mm fairly snug. As for the line up forget the feet and line up the needle in the centre of your dog foot which in your first picture looks about right.The KH foot is off set I think and you may want to open the hole right through at the left side of the front foot and consider that it will be easier and quicker to thread up as your old one was from the other side. May need to shave a little of the right side while your at it to allow more clearance from the back foot on the right.

I think it sould work fine. I have been using a light dimmer switch housed into a wooden box and a cresent soldering iron with various self shaped tips for over 20 years now and way before I ever heard about these fancy regad heat creases. These Robotemp boxes look nicer though.

Thanks @noobleather I used some overpriced spray paint for shoes at first but the clear finish wrinkled it up so I then resorted to using my old edging colours. They are a little exotic I guess because I sort of make them myself from a mixture of clear Ares AR 6350 ( you can get it from Texon in Melbourne) and many in the other countries will have it branded Fenice AR 6350. I use 90% clear AR6350 to 10% liquid pigments that I have previously bought from Clarient. You may have to replace that with the Stahl waterbase pigments that can be bought in smaller quantities. As to the guide ...its a bitch to adjust when you are adjusting the back and the top at the same time and you are looking for less than a 1/2mm line up. I decided to super glue the back to be a permanent 38mm(1 1/2") and that leaves me free to adjust the top only. If your not concerned about double line ups its good. Price I think would be $30.00 plus post ($11.00 express in Australia). If you want the stl file to print it let me know in a PM or I can print it for you. Regards Brain

Mike is dead right on that I reckon but although the end result is not really to my taste .....The pics show a pretty professional finish I think. Tape peels out nice A bit of a roll to make sure no edgesare sticking up Yeah it looks like shi...t oh so blue Painting is done A bit of pressure And its looks a lot better.....? The $300 2.5 watt Eleksmaker laser getting another $200+ resize with bigger rails. This will allow me to do a full belt in one go and is wide enough to do a large poster size which means I can now cut out my product boxing from full size sheets and I can get several boxes cutting at the same time. More to come on that later.

I thought about that but there is a lot of steps like making my own font for it and then the doing the font file for the outside 3d print and files for the laser cutting and settings and I just thought I would test the interest levels before I spent more hours trying to explain it all. So far very little interest I have seen so I will think about some more. I will dig back and find an earlier post where I started this project as it shows a few more of the steps involved -

Hey Brian, thanks for the trouble. I thought I was going to be able to use the Saddlebag font shown below by @Bigjake80 (Thanks Bigjake) but on checking on what claimed to be Free to use on some font site, Deiter Steffmanns page appears to say otherwise. I decided that it would not help much with what I wanted to do between laser files and 3d print files etc so I decided to make my own. THAT took a lot of learning and time and mistakes I can assure you. I hope to come up with a metal set of letters for my font in the near future. The advantage is I can type it out to show a customer and then laser cut the outline if I want or just place the letters against each other and stamp out the words. Thanks for your input on this point @LatigoAmigo. After a LOT of playing with the letter style and spacings between each letter I have come up with a font that seems to work well with most every thing I have thrown at it so far. (still early days yet though) There is no kerning in my font only the same spacings between which is just over 3mm apart. I have copyrighted this font and hope to put it out there when I finish getting the metal stamps for it finished. Example below shows the laser cut masking tape on a trial. This pic below shows the impression possible with a 3D printed block I did with this font This next one shows that the guide I printed can use the Ivan letter set as well, in this case a C and can give a cleaner looking impression. If a font for the Ivan set were available I think it would be too sharp to get a good line up over the masking tape and is also why I decided to make the width/thickness I did when I designed the font. Thank you again for the help you have offered and again to Rockoboy and Bigjake.

Ok I did it

I thought I had somethin worth posting in the gallery this morning and see this...........Daaaam......that is just toooo good. Maybe tomorrow.

Yes the letters are splayed wider at the bottom. As I tried to say above the height I gave from the base of the letter is 2.5mm and the base width of each letter is 2mm wide extruded up with a taper angle of 15 degrees inward from both edges at the base of the letter. In AutoCad this can be done in several different methods but in this case I started with the letter line in the middle and offset from that 1mm either side of the polyline. This helps for doing the laser cutting later which has to be a single line with no thickness otherwise the laser cuts both sides of the width of the line. Pain in the but....but sort of like solving a puzzle I guess. To make it more complex the dxf file that goes to the laser can not use polly lines and so must all be exploded first back into all of the broken up lines again. Until you get familiar with doing 3d drawings it may all sound a bit confusing to start with. Letters that have no holes in them like an A or an O can be just done at 15 degrees but for ones that have the holes the inner lines should taper at -15 degrees.They are best done first in order to make them easier to subtract the solid parts you need to get rid of as you go. Sorry if this is confusing yet but I will try and do more of a step type of process with some pictures when I finish the above project next week I hope. Thanks for the thoughts dikman. Amongst several issues I am now dealing with a bad case of rheumatoid arthritis which for a few years I have been ignoring and taking anti inflamitories etc to keep it at bay. Now I find out it can paralyse and even kill you. GREAT... and they have done enough scans now in three months to equal nearly a thousand x rays. If I don't have the big C already , I probably will get it now anyway. They wonder why I don't want to go in every time they call me for another Non urgent appointment. That's the end of my bitchin on this subject for now.

That is interesting and thanks for sharing. I am curious about not having a key way on the little pulley at the moment.

Congratulations @chrisash on getting a very worthwhile tool. Be patient and do a lot of getting used to your settings and how the can vary before trying to do too much too quickly. Lots of things like your temperature in different colour filaments and ideal bed temperatures for the given filament and a hundred other various adjustments, can make a big difference to the outcome. I have had a lot of health issues of late and along with a huge backlog of work to catch up on I am sorry I am limited to the help I can give you in a hurry. In order to help some with the above questions I can say that the pla+ has worked excedingly well with the stamp project I am currently working on. I am still working on this project at the moment and will give a more full break down of it over the next week or so but here a a few pictures to help show you more of what I mean. I should start by saying that the stamps in this case are a letter set that I have designed a font for that I want to use for stamping onto belts that have to be painted in different colours as well. This involves the use several different processes including the 3d printer and a 2.5 watt laser as well as a clicker press and so on. First I designed a guide to hold the letters which were going to be used with the Ivan letter set. As I could not get a font for the laser work I then designed my own. The following pic shows my stamp test held up well to the hammering down with the clicker press. This one shows that the Ivan letter set is thinner and a bit smoother but I have not bothered to smooth out the pla+ printed ones either. This one just shows where I am testing the line up of the laser cut masking tape with my stamp. AS you see I did not have it quite aligned as needed and I have to say that the thickness of the letter width is only .77 mm so it does take a little patience. There's that word again. Oh nearly forgot.... the letter height I used 2.5mm high off the block and 2mm wide at base extruding up at -15 deg inside the letter and 15 degrees outside the letter. I work in Autocad unfortunately so I cant help much in the other programs. Brian